Style combination · Contrasts

Black Lives Matter Street Murals × Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

Cairo's murals were painted against the state and erased by it; most Black Lives Matter street murals were painted with city permission, and many are maintained by cities or community groups, though the D.C. original was removed by its own city in 2025. Ask whose voice the paint speaks in before borrowing either.

From the research on Black Lives Matter Street Murals

Mix them and make something Black Lives Matter Street Murals Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, their arrangement from Black Lives Matter Street Murals, the finish from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Black Lives Matter Street Murals Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

Type from Black Lives Matter Street Murals: All caps
Type as image
Colour from Black Lives Matter Street Murals: Dark ground
Limited spot colours
Form from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Black Lives Matter Street Murals: Full bleed
Framed panels
Surface from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Black Lives Matter Street Murals

Rise

Bungee, standing in for Outline capitals drafted in white by a sign painter for other artists to fill, each in their own style (Japhy Witte's layout for the Capitol Hill mural in Seattle, 2020, whose letter dimensions were taken from Charlotte's mural)

Text · Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

Newsreader; Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art used Freehand Arabic slogans in spray paint and marker, sometimes with English lines, scrawled beside and over the pictures and Historical lām-alif ('no') forms collected from buildings, mosques, ceramics, textiles and books across the Islamic world, sprayed by Bahia Shehab

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Black Lives Matter Street Murals, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Black Lives Matter Street Murals Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

#141414 ground · 36%
#f2efe8 ink · 14%
#f6c400 accent · 18%
#c8102e accent · 14%
#c8963e accent · 10%
#1e7b3c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #141414;
  --ink: #f2efe8;
  --accent-1: #f6c400;
  --accent-2: #c8102e;
  --accent-3: #c8963e;
  --accent-4: #1e7b3c;
  --font-display: "Bungee", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

Black Lives Matter Street Murals: These murals answer police killings of real people, among them George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, are kept up by Black artists' collectives and community groups, and remain contested: Black Lives Matter DC called the D.C. mural a 'performative distraction from real policy changes', others were defaced with tyre marks, a swastika or 'All Lives Matter', and the D.C. original was dug up in 2025 under congressional pressure. Do not borrow the slogan, the road-yellow capitals or the letter-per-artist layout as decoration for a brand or a campaign that is not the movement's own; commission and pay Black artists and credit the painter of each letter (Seattle's transport department paid the collective about $3,000 per artist to repaint in 2020); and know that painting a road without a permit can break local law: in Florissant, Missouri, the city painted over activists' mural outside the police department again and again and police arrested two of them under an ordinance against street painting. Paintings made without the city are still part of the movement's own history, from Seattle's first mural, painted during the Capitol Hill occupation, to the Defund the Police slogans in Washington and Toronto.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals): These walls commemorate real people killed or maimed in 2011–13, whose families are alive, alongside images of women assaulted by security forces, Qur'anic verses and Coptic and Islamic sacred imagery; do not reuse martyr portraits, eye patches or the 'blue bra' as edgy protest styling for a brand, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and credit the artists and photographers by name. The walls were also religiously contested: Awad painted some of his Pharaonic women nude as a stand against the Wahhabi style of Islam, and Salafists erased some martyr portraits and put Qur'anic verses in their place, so do not pair those figures with Qur'anic verses for effect. After July 2013 the interim government built its own martyrs' memorial in Tahrir, which protesters wrecked, and the Muslim Brotherhood staked its own claim to the revolution's dead, so check whose dead a reused martyr motif would seem to mourn. Political street art remains dangerous in Egypt: Ganzeer was detained in 2011, four graffiti artists were detained for 12 hours in May 2015 after painting a mural, and 400 copies of Walls of Freedom were confiscated in Alexandria for allegedly 'inciting violence', so never put Egyptian artists or collaborators at risk with work attributed to them.

The two styles

2020–present · North America Black Lives Matter Street Murals A single protest slogan painted along the roadway in capitals 20 to 35 feet tall, filling the street from kerb to kerb, so it reads whole only from rooftops, drones and helicopters. Washington, D.C. set the pattern on 5 June 2020 with yellow traffic-paint letters near the White House; within weeks cities across the United States and a few abroad followed, often giving each letter to a different local Black artist to fill with portraits, patterns and colours, and community groups still repaint many of them.

A distressed, Egyptian-inspired illustrated poster centres on a young man with an eye bandage, a red halo and outspread multicoloured wings beneath the words “STILL HERE.” Military portraits, riot police, a funeral procession, Egyptian deities, flowers and birds fill the surrounding ochre, red, blue and black composition.

2011–2014 · Middle East & North Africa Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

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